Ponderings on Australians.

Cycling

Quite a lot of young Europeans think that Australians are tanned, sporty (surfers) and drink a lot of beer. This actually is very true. Sport here is not a hobby, it's a lifestyle. People run, swim, bike, paddle, surf and go to the gym a lot, and I can tell you that there is nothing leisurely about the way how they go about it. In the recent City to Surf run a great chunk of my co-workers ran either half-marathons or 12 km. I think it's all great, but it makes me question: why does everybody then drive to work?

I recently obtained a bike, and living a short cycling distance away from my work I started attempting to get to work by bike... but there are no bike lanes. Or there are bike lanes, but they suddenly end and the cyclist is forced to drive with the cars who really do not give space to cyclists (let alone pedestrians, even in tiniest roads with pedestrian crossings). So every day I've taken a different route to work, trying to find a way to cycle the distance so that it's not stressful. I've previously cycled with the traffic in Europe, and it's not an issue there. Here, it's impossible!

Also, the secure bike parking provided for a big building of maybe 300 workers is 20 spots. It is possible to salary sacrifice to pay for your car parking and to buy a car (so that you don't have to pay income tax on that money), but not for paying for a bike or public transport. This is definitely a city of cars, and it's not going to change anytime soon.

Reality TV

A lot of TV here is reality TV; MasterChef, Biggest Loser, Renovators, the Block, Next Top Model, X-Factor, you name it, there is an Australian version of it. Some of these programs actually have been pretty good in other countries - for example I loved the British MasterChef to bits- but here everything is made to take five times longer. So MasterChef UK was an hour a week for maybe 15 weeks. MasterChef Australia was 6 nights a week for the same period! An hour-long episode would usually consist of 15 minutes of ads, 15 minutes of "what will happen in this episode / after commercial break / happened before the break / will happen in the next episode", 15 minutes of how the contestants were feeling and maybe 15 minutes of the actual cooking and tasting the food. And still I ended up watching a lot of those episodes...

It seems that the main point of the programs is shifted from the actual competition to the people competing in it - their feelings, their interactions and relationships. MasterChef loves people who get along and cry together when one of them has to leave, and the Top Model loves girls who are bitchy and start fighting.

And this reflects to the politics too. It seems that people are interested in two things: paying as little tax as possible and scandals. Who cares how the prime minister has been running the country - there was someone in her party who cheated a big sum of money from the tax payers into his own pockets! Everything is made very personal it seems, and the closer the politics are to a Big Brother house, the happier the people are to talk about it. On the other hand, it is the only country where I've seen the PM (and the opposition leader) go in front of a live audience to answer people's questions on a regular basis.

Feminism

One day over lunch I was chatting to some of my co-workers and the conversation turned to women and their rights. And shockingly enough, there were a few young women who seemed to think it was progressive for women not to submit to men. I can see that there are still work to be done in women's rights if this is progressive thinking for Australia!